Listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM 600, Friday, October 19, 2012.

The Democratic National Convention got underway in Charlotte on September 4 and for three days last month, much was made of the administration’s success in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden dead, al-Qaeda on the ropes, Arab spring reformers lighting a path out of the darkness and into the sunshine of freedom and democracy. The convention crowd cheered. The prime-time TV audience watched.

That bright, shining message was intended to carry through until Election Day. But exactly one week to the day after the Dems convened in Charlotte, the real world intervened.

On September 11, (just a coincidence says the administration) a well-organized and well-armed group of Islamist radicals attacked the United States consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three U.S. diplomatic personnel.

As was known by administration officials almost immediately, the attack was pre-planned. The attackers came armed with rocket-propelled grenades and detailed knowledge of the layout and operations of the American consulate.

But instead of informing the American people of these facts, the Obama administration put out the story that the deadly attack arose from a spontaneous demonstration that erupted from outrage over a single American individual’s anti-Islamist YouTube video. White House press secretary Jay Carney thus informed a largely obsequious press corps. U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice thus informed the entire gamut of Sunday talk shows.

Despite growing evidence that the YouTube demonstration story was untrue, the administration doggedly stuck with it. The State Department actually went so far as to buy TV time in Libya to apologize for the video.

The administration vigorously prosecuted its fraudulent narrative despite the fact that not a single shred of information to support the thesis was ever conveyed to Washington by any U.S. personnel actually on the ground in Libya.

Let that sink in.

No one in Libya ever told the State Department or the White House that a demonstration was taking place or had ever taken place arising from anger over a YouTube video.

The timing could scarcely have been worse for the president. One week after spiking the football on Middle East policy in front of a prime time TV audience and eight weeks before a close election, the world as it really is dropped itself on his head.

The administration reacted to the politically inconvenient truth of a resurgent al-Qaeda and a deteriorating Middle East by perpetrating a coordinated effort to make the American people believe that the attack was a ‘one-off’ incident, devoid of larger significance. That was not true and everyone from President Obama to Joe Biden to Hillary Clinton to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice knew it wasn’t true.

Yet for weeks, they persisted in their attempts to mislead the American people. And when the YouTube story finally crumbled beneath their feet, the administration still stubbornly refused to characterize the attack as terrorism. To do so would be to admit that U.S. Middle East policy isn’t going as well as Obama said it was (and promised it would).

Then, as if this alone did not serve to redefine the word ‘mendacious,’[1] when directly challenged by Mitt Romney during Tuesday’s debate, the president tried to claim that a month’s worth of deliberate obfuscation and tap dancing notwithstanding, his one oblique use of the word ‘terror’ in a statement the morning after the attack should now be accepted as official, timely disclosure as to the true nature of the incident.

It would be laughable if it weren’t so grimly serious – and so appallingly cynical.

One can only hope that the families of those killed weren’t watching Tuesday’s debate.